I know little about North Korean history, but their official narrative and what I had also believed is that - long story short - Kim Jong-Il basically just inherited his dictatorial powers from his ...

The countries Spain and Luxembourg are currently ruled by kings from the House of Bourbon, so I thought I'd try to trace their (patrilineal) ancestry as far back as possible. Well, the Bourbons are ...

It is discussed in several books that the CIA had a mole in Indira Gandhi's cabinet around the time of the Liberation war for Bangladesh in 1971. There are conflicting reports about who the mole could ...

Were any of the various republican ideas or factions in the time of the English Civil War/Commonwealth of England given any support by people elsewhere in Europe?
I know the rest of Europe was busy ...

In Charles Stross (urban fantasy-ish) novel "The Atrocity Archives", it is claimed that the Iraqi Intelligence Service Mukhabrat was modelled on the Nazi-German Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA).
The ...

From Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell: "Civil war remained a common event, ...the economy collapsed, as successive emperors massively devalued the coinage to pay for their wars."
Other sources say ...

How many firearms in total were owned by civilian population between 1836 and 1912 in USA (cumulatively, not simultaneously)?
The timeframe is what I would consider "Old West" timeframe, but starting ...

Although the Holy Roman Empire was famous for being a loose confederation of largely independent feudal lords, it nevertheless possessed institutions akin to a unified state even near the end of its ...

Raja Raja Chola I was an Indian emperor from around the 11th century. He created an empire in South India through conquest, including naval campaigns. He was able to conquer Sri Lanka and the Maldives ...

Although the racial attitudes of the (third) KKK are well known, I haven't been able to find much about actions, demonstrations or speeches by the KKK against the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in ...

The Centuriate assembly (Comicia centuriata) was arguably the most important assembly of the Roman republic. It was in charge of electing consuls, praetors and censors, of voting laws, declaring war ...

Charles V (1500 – 1558) famously was ruler over an "empire on which the sun never set". It included large parts of Europe and also colonies in the new world. Charles V was born in the Low Countries ...

Background
The book "The Story of Ferdinand " is a short illustrated children's story featuring a bull who would not be provoked by a matador. When it was published in 1936, it was widely interpreted ...

In several accounts, it is claimed that conditions of men being recruited by the Chinese army were comparable to those in Nazi death camps. Are such accounts hyperbolic or largely accurate?
Thunder ...

(This question is also asked on judaism.SE for a different approach.)
Considering that variations have occurred in the Torah's text over time (I think the Gemara/Talmud may mention events where a few ...

I was fascinated by a passage in Thomas F. Madden's Venice: a New History describing the complex process used to elect the doge of Venice. This process is explained briefly here:
Wikipedia: Doge of ...

In the Football War between El Salvador and Honduras, the El Salvador claimed that genocide had occurred in Honduras. However, was anybody actually prosecuted for these actions, or were these claims ...

During Algerian decolonization, one episode was the Cafe War, when the mainstream Algerian independence group FLN and the communist MNA killed each other's members. This left several thousand dead in ...

Seeing this question about the oldest known exercise equipment, I remembered a scene from I, Claudius when Tiberius is working out with a medicine ball, so I thought that might be a good candidate. I ...